Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader
Users who hadn't already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing …
Context & Ripple Effects
Bloglines was once the flagship consumer RSS reader, but the service has now stopped working entirely while its parent company has done nothing to fix it — a collapse so complete that even founder Mark Fletcher is preparing to migrate to Google Reader. The exodus follows years of users drifting toward Google's reader as the de facto default, and it lands just before Bloglines briefly attempts a comeback in a return to challenge Google Reader.
First-order effects
- Remaining Bloglines users are forced to migrate immediately to Google Reader or other functional readers, since the service is down and unmaintained.
- Google Reader consolidates its position as the dominant RSS client, absorbing Bloglines' orphaned audience at essentially zero acquisition cost.
Second-order effects
- The collapse removes the last major independent competitor from the RSS reader market, leaving Google Reader with near-monopoly power over feed consumption — a dependency that later proved fragile when over 500,000 Reader users fled to Feedly within two days after Google shut it down.
- Other reader startups face a shrinking, declining market rather than an opening, as coverage of the space turns obituary-like with pieces such as Rest in Peace, RSS questioning the format's future.
Third-order effects
- Concentrating web reading habits in a single free corporate product creates systemic single-point-of-failure risk: when that product dies, millions of users must re-fragment across third-party clients overnight.
- The pattern — free utility services starved of investment until they fail — foreshadows how platform dependency becomes a structural liability for both users and the ecosystem built atop them.
The trend: This is one data point in the consolidation of RSS reading around a single dominant free platform — a concentration whose eventual collapse would scatter the market to third-party clients and contribute to RSS's long decline.